Comments on: Ruby tags considered harmful

By: Elliott

Elliott — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 16:40:29 +0000

Have you seen this?

http://kids.knowledgewing.com/verup/V2_verup1.html

I think this is the correct link. someone showed me a Japanese children’s web browser called Naviiy which will modify the page to display furigana above the kanji. So there isn’t any need to embed ruby into the html. You can also set which year you are at school so it will not add the furigana to the kanji you should already know.

By: Dan

Dan — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 15:27:07 +0000

I don’t like the pop up solution either. I already have rikaichan doing pop ups over words. In my opinion webpages should be flat and give the user the power to popup whatever they want. They shouldn’t force popups upon the user.

I think just have it written above using some css hackery and perhaps increase size on mouse over is the best solution.

By: Jon

Jon — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 11:54:36 +0000

Ruby tags also prevents rikaichan from highlighting entire words, as it stops on the ruby tags. Very annoying.

By: Pazu

Pazu — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 00:00:36 +0000

@David: as improbable as it may seem, there is no connection between Ruby as in furigana and Ruby the programming language. Ruby characters, the subject of this post, are named after a small British 5pt font used for side notes and similar text annotations. Ruby the programming language is named so as an allusion to Perl, a language that influenced Ruby's design.

By: stus

stus — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 21:38:20 +0000

the ruby tag is perfect example of creating xml hell! well pointed out!

By: David

David — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 19:06:16 +0000

Now it the first time i see the connection between the Ruby programming language (created by a japanese) and this… I thought it was named because of the jewel, but maybe it’s some kind of pun? :)

By: Tae Kim

Tae Kim — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 18:14:29 +0000

Even if ruby tags worked in all browsers perfectly, it won’t fix the fact that the markup itself is terrible or the fact that furigana should only be used sparingly.

By: Pazu

Pazu — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 18:09:18 +0000

Wikis and forums with macro/template support can make this even less painful. For example, JGJG Wiki has a template that looks like this:

and produces:

漢字

rikaichan makes any sort of ruby obsolete, anyway :)

By: Carl

Carl — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 18:04:20 +0000

You can make Ruby work for FireFox et al. using the proper CSS:

/* Ruby text*/
ruby
{display:inline-table;
text-align:center;
border-collapse:collapse;
/* border collapse mechanism
will be used to adjust vertical alignment */
vertical-align:middle;
/* if ruby text contains text only
and there are two ruby annotations
(one placed above the base and one below)
then vertical centering roughly aligns baseline of
base with baseline of parent */
border-bottom:solid 0.75em transparent;
/* o.75em is height of ruby text (0.5×1.2em = 0.6em)
plus space between baseline and text-bottom (about 0.15em)
this extra border is counter-weight used
to restore vertical centering broken
by presence of ruby text
(in case if there is only one ruby annotation,
if there are two annotations
then counter-weight is no longer
necessary and can be annihilated
using border collapse mechanism) */}
ruby > rt, rtc
{display:table-header-group;}
/* used to move first ruby
container above the base */
ruby > rb, rbc, ruby > rt + rt, rtc + rtc
{display:table-row;}
/* base and second ruby
are formatted as table-rows */
ruby > rt + rt, rtc + rtc
{border-bottom:hidden;}
/* if there are two annotations then extra
border is no longer necessary
and can be annihilated
using border collapse mechanism */
rb, rbc, rt, rtc
{white-space:nowrap;}
/* prohibits line breaks inside ruby text */
rtc > rt, rbc > rb
{display:table-cell;}
/* used to distribute annotations
in table like manner */
rtc > rt[rbspan]
{column-span:attr(rbspan);}
/* ruby text may span several cells */
ruby > rt, rtc
{font-size:0.5em;
line-height:1.2em;}
/* font-size of ruby text is reduced */
rp
{display:none;}
/* fallback markup is no longer necessary */